Sunday, February 20, 2011

How is everyone doing? We're in the midst of our K/C/WAL, but besides that we've all got our own, separate yarn and literary projects. I myself am knitting "Safire" for myself and a February Lady Sweater for my mom, working on them sporadically as the mood strikes me, and having limited success with a short story. (Operative word being "limited.")

From the group forum boards it seems that we have a large number of scifi/fantasy writers. That's pretty cool. I confess to having written a lot of very bad fantasy in my life. They are largely populated with tomboyish, kickass princess types and slimy, creeper, stereotypical, villains. Just based on that you could probably guess the plotlines of almost all of my stories. But for the rest of you who are able to write the genre welll, more power to you! :) I hope to read your books some day.

I've found my niche, if you want to call it that, in my historical fiction. (Boy, did that sound nerdy.) I have stories and parts of stories set in the American Civil War, the French Revolution, the Scottish wars for independence, the English Wars of the Roses, and the Spanish Inquisition. (The Scotland one is particularly embarrassing. The entirety of my research was careful study of the pictures on the outside of the Braveheart VHS box.) I like history because you can choose pretty much any time period you want, and the underpinnings of a plot are handed to you. As long as you develop your characters well enough, you can fling them into the whirling uproar that is revolutionary France or Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and watch the story spin itself. And when you get stuck, the historical events can kick and prod it along. (Enter the guillotine!)Yeah.

While I'm thinking about it. . . Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird is far and away the best and most entertaining book about writing that I have read. She has this hilarious, sarcastic, self-deprecating style, and writing tips and narrative are woven together so well that you could read the book just for the giggles even if you weren't into writing.Read it.

Emma/EnidAndGereint

PS- Entirely unrelated to above, but I'm looking at patterns for a shrug/wrap to wear with my prom dress in two months! Yeeee! :D